August 10, 2018

Argentina's Senate has rejected a bill to legalise elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, an issue that has divided the homeland of Pope Francis.

Lawmakers debated for more than 15 hours and voted 38-31 against the bill on Thursday.

The decision could echo across Latin America, where the Roman Catholic Church has lost influence and moral authority due to secularisation, an out-of-touch clerical caste and an avalanche of sex abuse scandals.

For long hours, thousands of supporters wearing green handkerchiefs that represent the effort to legalise abortion and opponents of the measure wearing light blue, braved heavy rain and cold temperatures to watch the debate on large screens set up outside Congress.

The demonstrations were largely peaceful, but after the vote, small groups of protesters clashed with police, throwing firebombs and setting up flaming barricades. Police officers responded with tear gas.

The lower house had already passed the measure and conservative President Mauricio Macri had said that he would sign it, even though he is anti-abortion.

In Argentina, abortion is only allowed in cases of rape and risks to a woman's health. Thousands of women, most of them poor, are hospitalised each year for complications linked due to unsafe illegal abortions.

The Health Ministry estimated in 2016 that the country sees as many as half a million clandestine abortions each year, with dozens of women dying as a result.

The Catholic Church and other groups oppose it, saying it violates Argentine law, which guarantees life from the moment of conception.

The contentious issue has divided Argentines, pitting conservative doctors and the Catholic Church against feminist groups and physicians.

"It's not about religious beliefs but about a humanitarian reason," Cardinal Mario Poli, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, told churchgoers at a "Mass for Life" at the capital city's Metropolitan Cathedral on Wednesday.

"Caring for life is the first human right and the duty of the state."

Pope Francis this year had denounced abortion as the "white glove" equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families "to accept the children that God gives them."

"Let's recognise that we're facing a public health tragedy because 3030 women who have died is a tragedy," said Magdalena Odarda, a senator for Rio Negro province.

"We're not deciding abortion yes or now. We're deciding abortion in a hospital, or illegal abortion, with a clothes hanger, or anything else that puts a woman in a humiliating, degrading situation - a real torture," she said.

For months, hundreds of doctors in Argentina had staged anti-abortion protests, in one case laying their white medical coats on the ground outside the presidential palace.

Feminists and other groups led even larger demonstrations in support of the measure, often wearing green that symbolises the pro-abortion movement, or red cloaks and white bonnets like the characters from the novel-turned-TV series The Handmaid's Tale.

December 9, 2017

When you get caught up in what the Trump administration is doing at home, it can be hard to think about anything else. However, Americans aren't the only ones feeling the effects of the current administration. There are a lot of ways that Trump's presidency is hurting people outside of the U.S., too.

Some manifestations of this are fairly straightforward. Pretty much as soon as Trump stepped into the Oval Office, he reinstated the so-called Global Gag Rule withholding U.S. foreign aid from any organization that so much as uses the word "abortion." This move makes access to life-saving health care more difficult for women and men around the world, and has damaging consequences on global public health in general, as American aid funds important public health work all over the world.

Then there are his multiple attempts at the travel ban, the latest of which the Supreme Court has allowed staying on the books, at least for now. The ban — which was amended to include Venezuela and North Korea in what many views as an attempt to avoid the claim that it's specifically targeting Muslims — affects citizens from several countries where ongoing conflict has made life difficult and dangerous: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Trump has thrown the lives of thousands of people into uncertainty as their efforts to get to safety in the U.S. fail in the face of the ban.

Trump's recent announcement that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital has also already caused turmoil. Many leaders have issued grave statements about the negative effects that this unilateral declaration could have on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. One Guardian columnist even claimed that Trump's statement was in effect "an act of diplomatic arson." In what is such a fraught diplomatic environment already, any additional tension that Trump creates with reckless policymaking could lead to actual lives lost.

Even some of Trump's smaller actions, like retweeting discredited anti-Muslim videos from a far-right party leader in the U.K., could provoke consequences. Both civil rights and Muslim organizations fiercely criticized Trump for essentially endorsing an extremist, Islamophobic political party abroad.

Trump hasn't shied away from the anti-Muslim sentiment in the past. Besides his earlier travel bans, he ran a campaign championing Islamophobic policies, including his call to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. Many say Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric is contributing to an uptick in hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S., and endorsing right-wing extremist fringe groups from abroad could empower them as well.

There's also his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO who had no political or diplomatic experience prior to taking on that role. By way of Tillerson, Trump is seriously hurting the State Department by cutting its budget and pushing people out from its highest ranks. Trump has also left important diplomatic positions unfilled. Pushing career diplomats out hurts America's position and citizens abroad and its diplomatic capabilities, making it less of a world player and allowing other countries to move ahead. When those countries have sordid records on human rights — and some of them do — that could have serious repercussions for people in war-torn or non-democratic nations.

While many of these affect only certain countries or certain groups of people, the Trump administration could have serious global consequences as well. Trump's been hawking what he sees as his own success evident in the economy, but international monitors believe that his administration and its inward-looking policies could actually pose a huge threat to the global economy.

The economic protectionism — that is, more restricted international trade markets — that Trump favors lead to slowed economic growth for the countries that maintain those restrictions. Protectionist policies could lead to more expensive products for consumers and threaten the job and income growth that has happened since the recession, especially when the world's biggest economy is instituting them. The world is still recovering from the economic downturn of 2008, yet Trump may be leading us towards another one that could be even worse.

Then there's the global fight against climate change, which Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from by pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans, and that it presents an enormous danger to all of humanity if we don't step up and begin changing things. Already, there's an argument that climate change and its resulting lack of natural resources like water and arable land helped to cause the war in Syria, and there are already so-called climate refugees who have had to flee from their homes in low-lying islands in the Pacific.

The U.S. is the only country that isn't part of the Paris agreement, and it's also the most significant carbon polluter in the world. Under Trump, the federal government is doing the least out of any country in the world to try to stop it. The consequences of climate change are clear to anyone paying attention and they will only get worse unless the world turns a corner. With Trump at the helm of in the U.S., it's looking less likely that that will happen.

In short, Trump is not making the world a better place. If you needed more reason to resist — and strongly — then here it is.

October 5, 2017

Republican congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania announced Wednesday that he would not run for a ninth term, amid tawdry revelations of an extramarital affair in which the anti-abortion lawmaker urged his mistress to get an abortion when he thought she was pregnant.

Murphy said in a brief statement through his office that he will “take personal time to seek help as my family and I continue to work through our personal difficulties.”

Murphy’s decision came a day after The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published text messages between Murphy and Shannon Edwards.

A Jan. 25 text message from Edwards told the congressman he had “zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” according to the newspaper.

A text message from Murphy’s number in response said his staff was responsible for his anti-abortion messages: “I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don’t write any more.”

Edwards, it turned out, wasn’t pregnant. Murphy recently acknowledged his affair with Edwards, which became public as a result of her divorce proceedings.

The revelation came as the House on Tuesday approved Republican legislation that would make it a crime to perform an abortion after 20 weeks of fetal development. Murphy, a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus, is among the bill’s co-sponsors and voted for it.

The Post-Gazette also published a six-page memo apparently written by Murphy’s congressional chief of staff and dated June 8, in which she accused Murphy of subjecting his staff members to “threats, hostility, anger and harassment.”

Neither Murphy nor his office has commented on the newspaper report.

Murphy is serving his eighth term representing a district in southwestern Pennsylvania, including parts of suburban Pittsburgh. The district is a safe Republican seat, with Republican Donald Trump beating Democrat Hillary Clinton by a margin of three-to-two in last November’s presidential election.

In an email to The Associated Press, Mr Daleiden called the charges against him "bogus" and said they were coming from "Planned Parenthood's political cronies".

Mr Daleiden's lawyer, Steve Cooley, said his client is "a martyr who's being crushed by the power of the State of California".

The Center for Medical Progress - the activists' anti-abortion group - caused a political uproar in 2015 when its heavily-edited videos accused Planned Parenthood of illegally selling aborted foetuses for a profit.

Planned Parenthood denied that, saying it is allowed to donate tissue to research firms for a procurement fee.

Human foetal tissue has been used in research since the 1930s, with current work focusing on diseases like AIDS and Parkinson's.

More than a dozen states investigated the profit claims, but found no evidence of illegal tissue harvesting or sales. Last month, a judge in Texas blocked attempts to cut government funding to Planned Parenthood over the secret videos, saying the state had failed to provide evidence of wrongdoing.

"A secretly recorded video, fake names, a grand jury indictment, congressional investigations - these are the building blocks of a best-selling novel," the judge declared.

Planned Parenthood said this week: “As we have said from the beginning, and as more than a dozen different state investigations have made clear: Planned Parenthood has done nothing wrong, and the only people who broke the law are those behind the fraudulent tapes."BBC

March 4, 2017

DUBLIN – A mass grave containing the remains of babies and young children has been discovered at a former Catholic orphanage in Ireland, government-appointed investigators announced Friday in a finding that offered the first conclusive proof following a historian’s efforts to trace the fates of nearly 800 children who perished there.

A result of pro life politics of the Church. Give it when this happened, there was very little,
a little girl, a marriage woman, rape victim or dating virgin could do of an unwanted pregnancy. When you deprive people of what comes naturally or what could happen by accident, sexual abuse, it has some strange and desperate consequences. Adamfoxie.blog

The judge-led Mother and Baby Homes Commission said excavations since November at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, had found an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing "significant quantities of human remains."

The commission said DNA analysis of selected remains confirmed the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks to 3 years old and were buried chiefly in the 1950s, when the overcrowded facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unwed mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.

Friday's findings provided the first proof after decades of suspicions that the vast majority of children who died at the home had been interred on the site in unmarked graves. That was a common, but ill-documented practice at such Catholic-run facilities amid high child mortality rates in early 20th century Ireland.

The government in 2014 formed the investigation after a local Tuam historian, Catherine Corless, tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who had died as residents of the facility — but could find a burial record for only one child.

"Everything pointed to this area being a mass grave," said Corless, who recalled how local boys playing in the field had reported seeing a pile of bones in a hidden underground chamber there in the mid-1970s.

The government's commissioner for children, Katherine Zappone, said Friday's findings were "sad and disturbing." She pledged that the children's descendants would be consulted on providing proper burials and other memorials.

"We will honor their memory and make sure that we take the right actions now to treat their remains appropriately," Zappone said.

The report found that the dead children may have been placed in underground chambers originally used to hold sewage. Corless said she found records stating that the sewage systems were used until 1937, when the home was connected to a modern water supply.

A decommissioned septic tank had been "filled with rubble and debris and then covered with top soil" and did not appear to contain remains, the report said. But excavators found children's remains inside a neighboring connected structure that may have been used to contain sewage or waste water.

The commission's finding that most of the remains date to the 1950s corroborates Corless' collection of death certificates. It also dispels a popular argument that bones seen at the site might predate the orphanage's opening, when the building was a workhouse for the adult poor, or even be from people who died in the mid-19th century Great Famine.

Labour Party lawmaker Joan Burton said the Tuam orphanage's dead may have been interred "without normal funeral rights, and maybe even without their wider families having been made aware." She called on the Catholic Church to provide more assistance to investigators.

The investigators, who are examining the treatment of children at a long-closed network of 14 Mother and Baby Homes, said they still were trying to identify "who was responsible for the disposal of human remains in this way."

The Bon Secours Sisters order of nuns, which ran the home until its closure, said in a statement that all its records, including of potential burials, had been handed to state authorities in 1961. It pledged to cooperate with the continuing investigation.

Corless criticized the Bon Secours response as "the usual maddening nonsense. They must apologize and take responsibility for what happened there."

She called on the nuns to promise explicitly to help the state organize proper marked burial places for every dead child once each set of remains could be identified.

“That's the least that can be done for them at this late stage," she said.

December 24, 2013

Recovering: Theresa Tapia rests at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond just after surger in pregnancies to full term

West Virginia

A West Virginia physician who has claimed that he sees complications from abortions “probably at least weekly,” is under tight scrutiny, and it could have professional implications. Dr. Bryon Calhoun provided his assessment of the dangerous nature of abortions and the lack of clinic regulation in the state as part of his testimony earlier this year, when the state’s Attorney General sought comment on whether or not to pass new regulations. However, a report from RH Reality Check proved that despite his claims, no abortion complications were reported to the board of health.

Now, West Virginia legislators are asking for further investigation into Dr. Calhoun, demanding that he be held responsible for either not reporting the numerous complications he saw, as he was obligated to do, or for having not reported them because they simply did not exist. “If upon your review you find Dr. Calhoun made knowingly false statements, I respectfully request the Board of Medicine to take swift action,” State Delegate Nancy Peoples Guthrie (D-Kanawha) said in a formal complaint she filed with the West Virginia Board of Medicine. “Given Dr. Calhoun’s position in teaching future physicians at West Virginia University and the impact his statements have made on matters of significant public importance in our state, your review is critical.”

A censure of any sort on Dr. Calhoun may be difficult, however. The doctor was already formally reprimanded by his own university this summer, after his extensive involvement in a lawsuit against one of the state’s clinics. Liberty Institute became involved on Dr. Calhoun’s behalf, saying that the school was infringing on his religious beliefs by attempting to limit his volunteer activities, and the reprimand was withdrawn.

Whether a judgment from the medical board would meet with the same fate remains to be seen.

New Abortion Restrictions Across Several States

While Michigan residents are still trying to understand what the new “abortion rider” on their insurance plans will mean, a new article reports that part of the reason the governor may have opposed the idea himself was the influence of his own wife and daughters. Ohio also has an abortion rider that they passed, but theirs could potentially endanger birth control coverage, too.

Anti-abortion protesters are angry at a South Carolina university that they are accusing of “using taxpayer funds” to train doctors to perform abortions. The University’s response: it’s a medical school, and if we don’t, we’d lose accreditation. Churchgoers and parents in Canada are angry with a local church’s anti-abortion sign, but many are afraid to speak out publicly out of fear of “retaliation” from the church or its associated school.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was found guilty of murder in the deaths of infants born during illegally performed abortions, has received an additional 30 years in jail for crimes relating to drug charges.Forcing Women to Have Children

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